Never before in English, Regina Ullmann's work is distinctive and otherworldly, resonant of nineteenth-century village tales and of authors such as Adalbert Stifter and her contemporary Robert Walser. In the stories of The Country Road, largely set in the Swiss countryside, the archaic and the modern collide, and "sometimes the whole world appears to be painted on porcelain, right down to the dangerous cracks." this delicate but fragile beauty, with its ominous undertones, gives Ullmann her unique voice